Electronic communication such as email, text messaging, and instant messaging predominate how people privately communicate with one another on a day-to-day basis. Further, email and text messaging are regularly used to transmit highly confidential information such as website password reset information and information related to various accounts held by the user. In other words, those technologies have in some ways become the “root of trust” of the Internet. However, messages transmitted using, for example, email can be easily intercepted, modified, or replayed thereby making them very unsecure.
Various techniques have been employed to secure electronic messaging technologies such as email. However, many of those technologies are centralized and/or manual approaches to security management. That is, the technologies typically require the involvement of a third party or specific infrastructure and therefore have been slow to be adopted. For example, email signing such as Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) could be used to detect modifications to email content; however, internet-based S/MIME deployment is dependent on the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which does not extend easily to ordinary users and risks loss of privacy.